America fires cruise missile on Assad’s air base

On President Donald Trump’s order, the US launched the strike on the Syrian airfield in response to an alleged chemical weapons attack in the town of Khan Sheikhun in Idlib province earlier this week.

It was the first direct US assault on the government of Bashar al Assad in six years of civil war.

The missile strikes were one step away from clashing with the Russian military, Russia’s Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev charged on Friday, underscoring the risks in Trump’s first major foray into the Syrian civil war.

In the biggest foreign policy decision of his presidency so far, Trump ordered the step his predecessor Barack Obama never took: directly targeting the Syrian military for its suspected role in a poison gas attack that killed at least 70 people.

The Kremlin denounced the strikes as illegal. “Years of previous attempts at changing Assad’s behavior have all failed and failed very dramatically,” Trump said as he announced the attack from his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, where he was meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Syria’s official SANA news agency said nine civilians, including four children, were killed and seven people were injured.

The Syrian army also reported that six Syrian soldiers were killed and there was “big material loss” at the military facility.

The office of President Bashar al-Assad said in a statement that the “foolish and irresponsible” attack reveals Washington’s short-sightedness.

Damascus said it would intensify operations against foreign-backed Takfiri terrorists.

“What America did is nothing but foolish and irresponsible behavior, which only reveals its short-sightedness and political and military blindness to reality,” the statement said.

AFP quoted a Syrian military source as saying, “We learned of the American threat and the expected military bombardment on Syrian territory.”

“We took precautions in more than one military point, including in the Shayrat airbase. We moved a number of airplanes towards other areas.”